Or Kane. Or Cain. The primordial killer, Caine is back. If you think Howard is grim, Wagner is dark, Adam Colby (whoever the heck that is) is bleak, try Stover, and especially Caine, the reality show for people who can’t stand reality.

Actually, this book has been out since last October, but with all the Howard coming out I haven’t been able to keep up with my other favorites so well as I’d like. Stover has been wasting his time and talent with Star Wars novels so much lately, this one kind of snuck up on me.

The Caine books are that rarity that tries to put science fiction and fantasy into the same story and actually doesn’t come off as lame.
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Just a heads-up to all Howard fans out there looking to increase their holdings of REHupa mailings. In the coming days I will be posting a bunch for sale. The first five are already up, with more to follow in the coming days. For information about why REHupa mailings are so collectible, go here.

Also, for those of you looking to complete your Deluxe sets of The Cimmerian, there have been some lots for sale at eBay that include some of the out-of-print issues you are looking for. The latest is here.

Read enough Robert E. Howard and you start to see him everywhere, particularly in the works of his contemporaries. Case in point: I recently listened to an audio version of Ernest Hemingway’s non-fiction treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and my Howard-addled brain began to piece together tenuous, but perhaps not entirely unfounded, connections between the disparate authors.

Hemingway and Howard are alike? Didn’t one write about traumatized and/or impotent war veterans named Nick and Jake, and the other about unstoppable, larger-than-life heroes from impossibly ancient times with names like Conan and Kull? I’ll admit that if the only Hemingway you’ve read is The Garden of Eden or A Moveable Feast, you’ll find little in common with these tales and Howard’s Hour of the Dragon or “The Vale of Lost Women.” But Death in the Afternoon is a very different animal than Hemingway’s softer stories. It’s a raw, unflinching look at a sport many consider barbaric and cruel, but which Hemingway admired very deeply. And then it struck me: What is Death in the Afternoon if not heroic fantasy? What are the Spanish bullfighters of Hemingway’s work if not modern-day gladiators, heroes with swords? Wealth, fame, and great heights are theirs for the taking, but are entirely dependent on their bravery, grace, and skill with cape and sword.

Could Howard have derived some inspiration from Death in the Afternoon and/or Hemingway’s stories in general? We know Howard read Hemingway. According to the REH Bookshelf, an invaluable resource painstakingly compiled by Howard scholar Rusty Burke, Howard had a copy of “Winner Take Nothing” on his bookshelf. This collection contains “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “A Natural History of the Dead” (this latter must-read vignette also appears in Death in the Afternoon), among other short stories. Given his prodigious appetite as a reader Howard may very well have read Death in the Afternoon. Although he didn’t have it on his bookshelf at the time of his death, Howard’s sensibilities are splashed on its pages like the blood of a soft, city-bred Nemedian on a Pictish axe.

While Death in the Afternoon may not bear the aspect of swords and sorcery, if you swap out Madrid and muletas for Aquilonia and broadswords, the lines between the two authors become quite blurred. Death in the Afternoon tells the stories of men — some brave, some cowardly, others just doing a job — who deal in death and place their lives on the line for the wages of blood. With their athletic grace and killer’s eyes, they are very much like Howard’s prize-fighters and treasure-seeking swordsmen.

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Today, right in the midst of a domicilic transition, The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard landed on my doorstep. Knowing the consequences of giving in to temptation, I steeled my will and carried on carryin’ on the washer and the fridge and the bookcases…

Night has fallen and I now give myself a most just reward, drinking deep from the cup of Howard’s poetic genius.

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From the very beginning of his career, up to the very end, Robert E. Howard wrote stories that involved a man and a woman and a third force that had to be overcome before they could be together. The man, strong and often dark, was Howard’s projection of his self to some extent, and the woman, often blonde, was a projection of his anima, the standard version involving a feminine aspect. From the early days of “Spear and Fang” and “The Hyena” to later works like “Red Nails” and the novelized GENT FROM BEAR CREEK, this “boy meets girl, boy loses girl temporarily to dark menacing Other, boy wins girl” story line appears quite frequently. The dark menacing Other is the shadow. But as has been pointed out by critics like Leslie Fiedler and Richard Slotkin, an unusual aspect of American classic literature is the frequency with which the dark menacing Other becomes the anima; or takes its place.

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If swords and sorcery is to stage a comeback — and let’s face it, the genre is not only languishing these days, it’s barely got a pulse — there must be paying markets to furnish an incentive for budding writers. So I was pleased to recently stumble across what appears to be a promising, albeit yet-to-debut publication in the S&S space, and one that also offers cash upon publication: Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

From a description on the HFQ Web site:

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an ezine dedicated to publishing short works of heroic fantasy. More than that, through both prose and poetry we hope to hearken an older age of storytelling — an age when a story well told enthralled audiences. Traits of great oral storytelling survive the ages to influence treasures of literature, the pulps, radio plays, late-night game sessions, and now Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Our favorite storytellers, a few ancient and a few not, deliver action, reaction, and repercussion — and rarely divulge the thought processes that guide a character. These storytellers know that sometimes an audience just wants to see what happens next, that sometimes it’s more interesting to watch a person open a box than to hear about why he or she decided to open it in the first place.

Not being too hung up on the divisions within fantasy (save the broad, unmistakable strokes of high fantasy and swords and sorcery), I’ll admit to being a little fuzzy on the differences between “heroic fantasy” and swords and sorcery. The emphasis on action and storytelling described above sure sounds a lot like S&S. The deliberate avoidance of “thought processes” is not necessarily a hallmark of the genre (Robert E. Howard’s Kull was notably brooding and philosophical, and the Kull stories were hardly plodding), but I think I know what the editors of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly are driving at: They plan to print stories that feature action and story over interior monologues (and hopefully less emphasis on “world-building” too, which I’m frankly sick to death of).

This rather unhelpful Wikipedia article on heroic fantasy doesn’t offer much insight on the type of fiction Heroic Fantasy Quarterly plans to publish, nor offer any useful definitions. L. Sprague de Camp is quoted at the bottom of the page as stating that heroic fantasy is synonymous with S&S; unfortunately the rest of the article negates the quote, stating that “although it shares many of the basic themes of sword and sorcery the term ‘heroic fantasy’ is often used to avoid the garish undertones of the former” (just what S&S needs — more bad press, and from Wikipedia, no less). The entry also groups together such dissimilar authors as J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Karl Edward Wagner, and Robert Jordan under the heroic fantasy banner. Quite a muddled grouping, there.

Fortunately, the editors over at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly say they are “unrepentant in our goal of restoring unapologetic sword and sorcery to a rightful high place.” I for one would love to see a revival of S&S. We may never see writers the caliber of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber working in the genre again, but we can hope. I’d certainly like to see some alternatives to 1,000-plus page volumes of overwritten high fantasy series that require decades to write (and read). Give me the next lean, mean, 200-page Hour of the Dragon, thank you.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly will be an online-only publication, which has its drawbacks and its positives. I’ve never been a big fan of ezines and online publishing, but I can handle reading short stories on a computer, so I’m okay with the format. And given the losing proposition that is print nowadays, I can’t say I fault the decision.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is currently accepting submissions and pays $100 for fiction and $25 for poetry (I’m very much surprised and intrigued that they plan to publish verse). The first issue is due out in July. So go to it, aspiring writers!

*Art by Chris Achilleos

“Saint Padraic’s Day usually leaves me with a distaste for the whole Celtic Irish race.” Robert E. Howard, from a letter to Harold Preece, ca. early April, 1930.

Howard’s Hibernophilia is hard to contest, but reading the above quote might cause one to wonder. In context, the meaning becomes much clearer. REH (whose photo to the left could easily be that of a “Black Irish” workman of the early twentieth century) noted the “questioning glances” of fellow Texans “who wear purely Gaelic surnames.” His response to such affronts was that, “I’ll wear the green if I have to fight every damned Celt in the world.” A suitably pugnacious Howardian (and Celtic) attitude, in my opinion.

Howard was always ambivalent in his regard for the Irish. In another letter to Preece, REH wrote, “Damn the Irish and damn the black Milesian blood in my veins that makes me like drift-wood fighting the waves and gives me no peace or rest waking or sleeping or riding or dreaming or traveling or wooing, drunk or sober, with hunger or slumber on me”. Again and again REH railed against the waywardness and instability that he saw in the Celtic psyche. “What has my Celtic blood ever done to me but give me a restless and unstable mind that gives me no rest in anything I do”? Obviously, despite Robert E. Howard’s heart-felt pride in his Irishness (the true extent of that Irishness is something Patrice Louinet is researching even now), he didn’t view Erin nor her children through green-tinted glasses, at least not in every instance. (Continue reading this post)

Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook is released

Don Herron is the best critic in Howard studies, bar none. However, REH is but a small part of his professional output. He’s most famous for helming the longest-running literary walking tour in the US, San Francisco’s Dashiell Hammett Tour. Over three decades it has become a Bay Area institution and a must-do for mystery fans and literati alike. In 1991 City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s legendary counterculture imprint, published Don’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour: A Guidebook, which garnered great reviews and has been much sought after on the used market, often selling for over $100 in fine condition.

Now, Don has released a brand new, fully revised and updated version of his book. Published by Vince Emery as a part of his Ace Performer Collection, a group of titles by and about Hammett, this new edition looks beautiful, and is in hardcover to boot. Don has been running around doing various appearances in support of the release — just in the last few weeks he hit Boise, Idaho; Tuscon and Scottsdale, Arizona; and a bunch of places in and around San Francisco. MSNBC has a write-up of the book’s contents and of Don’s future book signings in the Bay Area. You can also keep up with the action at his website.

All of Don’s books are well worth hunting down — he’s collected, in fact, by the prestigious Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, an organization that calls him on their website “the godfather of San Francisco mysteries.” But The Dashiell Hammett Tour book occupies a special place in his canon. The tour has been written up hundreds of times in virtually every major newspaper and venue, making it one of the most popular of its kind in the world. It (and Don) even appeared as an answer/question combo on Jeopardy! once. (To bring a bit of Cimmerian flavor into all of this: Don found out about the Jeopardy! thing when his good pal, the fantasy writer Fritz Leiber, called him up with the info. Leiber was a Jeopardy! fiend in his later years and caught wind of the Herron appearance during his usual afternoon viewing.)

So if you are a Hammett fan, or a fan of great literature in general — pick up a copy of the book at Amazon or wherever fine mystery books are sold.

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Those of us who remember the agonizing wait between new issues of the Watchmen limited series have at last endured through an even more momentous wait – the famed graphic novel has finally been released as a movie. Of course, many elements of the story had to be trimmed or chopped, but as a Cliff Notes version, it’s a very faithful adaptation, for the most part. Like the makers of the so-called Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though they are doing great right up to the end, they feel they have to have at least one really significant change. Don’t ask me why.

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From such sources, as well as just about any other imaginative writing or screenplay, you will be able to pluck kernels from which to grow the fruits of exciting campaigns. Good reading!

–Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide, Appendix N

A little more than a year has passed since we lost Gary Gygax, creator of the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy roleplaying game and an imaginative giant, “one of the seminal influences in fantasy in the twentieth century,” according to Leo Grin, publisher of The Cimmerian.

Gygax’s death was and is still keenly felt for a number of reasons. First and foremost, he created a game of unbridled imagination that is still going strong more than three decades after its inception, surviving the rise of computer “roleplaying” games, misguided attacks by the media, and even misplaced religious fervor. D&D continues to be played by youths as well as adults who never lost their love for the game nor suffered the unfortunate calcification of their imagination.

But Gygax’s other legacy is his role as a champion of fantasy fiction. He helped to introduce a generation of gamers to the pleasures of fantasy fiction (I count myself in this group ). Even those who have since moved on from D&D paused to honor and remember Lake Geneva’s most famous resident for fostering in them a lifelong love of reading following his death on March 4, 2008.

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